


Good ships scuttled on the deep

by jauneclair



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, M/M, a teeny bit of silverflintham, season 4 canon adjacent, silvermadi friendship/some feels, swordplay foreplay, what if silverflint were a couple instead of silvermadi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-21
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2019-05-26 04:17:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14992577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jauneclair/pseuds/jauneclair
Summary: His fingers follow flecks of blood down to the point of his captain’s cheekbone. A thin pink scar, no wider than John’s fingernail, marks Flint’s pale skin. Flint’s eyes close completely.“I thought it was a welcome,” John says.Silver and Flint become lovers following the battle on Maroon Island. S4 AU with established silverflint relationship and some canon divergences.





	1. Chapter 1

They burn the English dead and bury their people, Maroon and pirate alike, on the first day after the battle. For two days after that, they feast and drink.

John and his crewmates (his men) mingle with the Maroons more easily than Rackham and Teach’s crews; familiarity has not yet bred contempt, but lessened it, particularly in light of this victory. For now. John sits with Madi and her mother as they offer up stories of the dead, reverent and jubilant by turns – with Rackham and Bonny, swapping a bottle of rum and condemnations of Nassau’s governor with the former while the latter looks out from beneath the brim of her hat, sharpening her knives – then John’s getting pissed with his crewmates. He swears that Joji calls him John the Giant.

Dusk blends into night blends into dawn blends into day, and the next day they carouse again.

He doesn’t go to Flint until the second evening, but during the periods when he’s sobered up enough to know that his only two choices are to keep drinking or to sleep for an entire day, Flint’s shadowed face from the forest comes to him.

_Everything ended._

How tired his captain had looked after he’d spoken to John of Thomas Hamilton. Not the hunger-wrecked exhaustion of the Doldrums or the Maroon Queen’s cages; but soul-weary, with the past reflecting in his eyes, greener and clearer than the bottle they’d shared between them.

The Flint who’d appeared on the shore, caked in dirt, blood-soaked, shoulders heaving beneath the bloodstained shirt stretched across his chest, carved from the stones of victory, meeting John’s gaze across the river: that was almost a different man. Almost. From the battlefield of their shared devising, Flint descended to meet him as equal.

The night in the forest had seemed like an initiation. There were  softer things to be discovered in the darkness. Beneath Flint’s skin. Flint’s smile and story told him so. Around the fire the other night, Silver had passed the test.

Round and round his head ran with rum and tales and rum and Flint, until the sun set on the second day of their celebration, the third after their victory, and he found himself sitting, sobering, on the steps of the cabin assigned to Flint, kneading the sore muscles of his leg.

“Is it bothering you still?”

John throws an arm up to shield eyes. Red-haloed by the setting sun, looming like a demigod, Flint regards him.

“Not particularly. I mean, a little, but only on account of my own foolishness. I was trying to dance with Mad and took a tumble. Howell’s already told me off.”

Flint huffs a short laugh. “I’m glad you’re feeling more yourself.”

Flint sits down next to him. The god made flesh – surprisingly tender flesh, for there is still a scabbed cut on Flint’s temple. John reaches up to it, unthinking.

“This is who I am now,” John says.

Flint’s eyelids lower as John traces around the scab. His fingers follow flecks of blood down to the point of his captain’s cheekbone. A thin pink scar, no wider than John’s fingernail, marks Flint’s pale skin. Flint’s eyes close completely. John traces that scar over and over again.

Flint reaches up and wraps his hand around John’s fingers, squeezing them gently and pulling them from his face.

“I should take you back,” Flint says, gruff, rising.

“I thought it was a welcome,” John says, looking up. “When we were sitting here and you said – ”

“You’re drunk,” Flint says, cutting John off. He takes a step back, bumping up against the railing.

John surges to his feet, a denial on his lips, but it’s true, he’s still at least a little drunk, and he topples forward, arms ready to windmill out to catch himself –

But Flint is already there, borne back a step when he takes the brunt of John’s weight. John’s arms draw around Flint’s waist. His anger simmers and quells against the coarse fabric of his captain’s shirt. He ducks his head in, pressing against Flint’s neck, breathing him in. The scent he recognizes from that first night on the Wrecks, rocks against his back: blood iron and hauling rope.

“I thought you said it was a welcome,” John breathes against Flint’s skin, which prickles with goosepimples.

Beneath him, around him, Flint’s stiff body relaxes; his own body sways as Flint exhales. John turns cheek away – how pathetic he is, suddenly, half drunk, half a man, clinging to his captain out in the open like a long-lost lover. Flint already has his share of lost lovers.

A hand rubs between John’s shoulder-blades. “You need to sleep,” Flint rumbles.

John lifts his head. Flint’s eyes are very green and very clear, like an empty bottle of rum. “Is that an order, captain?”

“Yes.” Flint’s knucklepads knead at John’s shoulders through his shirt.

“Can I do it here?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Flint says, “Yes.”

John allows Flint to guide him inside, arms around each other’s waists. They wrestle together with John’s shirt: it takes both of them to remove it, and they come to a mutual, wordless agreement that John’s trousers are too much effort to remove in his current state. The line of Flint’s back as he moves around the small hut, dousing the lights, is stiff straight with unease. It unbends, ever-so-slightly, when he turns to find John still conscious and still propped on one elbow, regarding him.

“Wait,” John says before Flint can douse the last light. Flint glances over his shoulder. “Take off your shirt,” John says.

Flint raises his eyebrows. “Is that an order, Mr. Quartermaster?”

John shrugs, but he’s uncoordinated in his inebriated condition and he falls back, splayed against the bedding. “Does it need to be? Take off your shirt, captain.”

Flint regards him for another moment, then draws off his shirt with infinitely more grace than they’d removed John’s. Before John has a chance to process this sight, Flint is sliding down next to John, the bare soles of his feet brushing against John’s calves.

“Shy?” John whispers.

“You shit,” Flint says, but his magnificent freckled chest is glowing the same shade of red as his ears. He reaches over John to douse the last candle on the table beside them. “Go to sleep.”

He dreams of dry lips in a forest of beard pressing a kiss against his forehead.

In the morning, he wakes alone and with a roaring headache. He would dismiss it all as a dream, a drunken hallucination, but the evidence is all presented so neatly before him: he’s in Flint’s hut, in Flint’s own bed. He rolls over and breathes in the narrow space were Flint had lain shortly before, the bedding still faintly impressed. It still holds Flint’s smell, if not his warmth.

The headache claws at his temples and his tongue is dry and thick in his mouth. In search of water, he finds on the table a full pitcher and a note Flint has left for him: _Southern Cliffs. Midday._

John lets the sliver of paper drop through his fingers. Was last night to be the beginning and the end of it? The note is brusque, but so is Flint even under the most giving of circumstances. There are innumerable reasons why Flint may be eager to quash whatever it is that grows between them a little more each day, this thing that neither of them cannot or will not name. Their own recent lack of trust, for one, might be foremost among Flint’s worries. Flint’s ten year crusade in the name of his lost love, another.

John drinks, bathes, dresses. It’s nearing midday already when he stands at the foot of the path leading to the cliffs. He’ll never know the name of this thing if he doesn’t follow it.

At the summit, Flint waits for him with two swords in the sand and a crutch, a smile and some amusing words about learning to fight and not die.

John is terrible at first, more liable to kill himself with the crutch and sword than any Redcoat is. Flint is calm, patient - almost irritatingly so, in how he draws John’s frustration out of him like poison from a wound, leading him through form after form. John is envious of the way Flint’s body flows from pose to pose, effortless. When Flint removes his coat in the high heat of the tropical sun, John’s cheeks flush and his mouth dries out in a way that has nothing to do with his hangover or the envy of a crippled man. The way Flint’s shirt stretches across his broad shoulders, the smattering of golden-red hair in the V of his shirt – John doesn’t have to use his imagination for any of that, now.

He ducks his head for a moment, leaning on his crutch to draw his hair back into a tail at the nape of his neck.

“I think that’s enough for today,” Flint says. “Don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” John says, breathless.  Flint throws him a waterskin. They sit on opposite rocks, their knees nearly touching.

“Do you remember any of last night?”

“Vaguely, most of it,” John says. “But my memory of being in your bed is quite intact, if you’re wondering.”

Flint ducks his head and scrubs at his beard with one hand. “That’s – good.” He’s looking towards Nassau again. “Perhaps you’d care to join me there again sometime.”

John sets down his waterskin. “Sometime like tonight?”

Flint turns back to him, the corners of his eyes wrinkling. He smiles, and leans in.

* * *

John stretches.

“You can’t keep using me like this, you bastard.”

He raises his arms above his head and curls his toes. Both actions fail to relieve the ache that subsists on every square inch of his flesh. Fucking only alleviates it for a short, albeit blissful, time before the pain returns, all the more vengeful for his brief reprieve.

“Use you?” Flint rolls over to scowl, indignant. “It’s _my_ arse, you shit.”

“And who am I to deny you your pleasure, captain? Though don’t think I didn’t catch you limping the other day.” Flint’s fingers wrap themselves around a fistful of John’s curls. “Your rigorous demands of me, both in your arse and out of it, have left me feeling rather – sore.”

“Poor boy,” Flint purrs. He tugs at John’s curls, which has John moaning and curling his toes again, arching into the sensation. Under Flint’s wolfish gaze, John’s ears redden. Flint’s other hand squeezes Silver’s left thigh, fingers proving the muscle. The relief ripples through him. “You could simply ask me to help you for once, Mr. Long John Silver.”

“A compliment rolled into an insult - how unlike you, Captain.” John spreads his legs open a little wider, smirking when Flint’s eyes inevitably draw downward. “Are we talking about my cock, or are we talking about this fearsome reputation that Billy has constructed for me?”

Flint tugs John’s hair again, a bit sharper this time. “Is there something in either of those two items that you think we need to talk about?”

John’s heart speeds up. “Are you...bothered by it? The rumors that Billy’s spreading? You must know that I don’t intend - ”

“To usurp me?” Flint grins, wolfish, the hollows of his cheeks shadowed in the nighttime light. His hand in John’s hair turns to a light touch, scratching the scalp. John resists the urge to press into it, because he wishes to be clear-minded about whatever Flint will say next. “You said there was no pride between us, wasn’t that right? I have to admit that I am surprised by my own lack of pride in this matter. Even with Miranda, she wasn’t a full partner to me, not until just before…”

Flint’s eyes go glassy for a minute as he continues to roll John’s curls between his fingers. John doesn’t dare interrupt.

Flint finally looks back at him with a small smile that is not entirely free of sadness. “I am not bothered by standing in front of you. I am not bothered by standing behind you. But the place where I most hope I can find you is by my side, and me by yours.”

John closes his eyes against the gentle scratching of Flint’s nails against his scalp.

“And as for Long John,” Flint whispers in his ear, his other hand squeezing John’s hip, “I quite enjoy the feel of him inside me.”

His eyes fly open and he surges forward to, frankly, maul Flint with kisses, but the other man is laughing while he reaches for the oil they use, on the low table beside Flint’s cot.

“Turn over so I can rub down your back.”

“My _back,_ hm?” John rolls over easily enough. “Are you sure it’s not so you can get a better view of my arse?”

He wiggles the body part in question, for emphasis, a gesture met by a playful but forceful smack on the rear. Arousal crouches in John’s belly immediately and he rubs his face against the pillow. Too often he worries that this is all a fever dream that’s due to awaken from any moment, right before the end, back in the captain’s cabin on the Spanish warship with a haze in his head and a blank space in his leg.

He groans again, brought back to himself when Flint splays his palms across the width of John’s shoulders and begins to massage the oil into his skin with fingers moving in small circles. Flint hooks his thumbs beneath an especially tight knot between John’s shoulder blades and presses deep into the muscle. The simple action of it delivers a relief so profound that John’s mind buzzes as though drunk. His groan is loud and unabashed as his shoulders loosen.

“That’s it,” Flint says. His hands press and prod and caress their way down John’s back, often forcefully but never without care. All his world has been pain and reminders of pain since Charles Town; at this point, even his soul is bruised. But Flint’s ministrations are undeniably helpful. “Let go.”

Flint’s hands skim over John’s arse as he moves them to the right leg, massaging his thumbs into the dip behind John’s knee. Last of all they find the crease of his arse, pressing just this side too shy of a tease. At the first groan that drops from John’s mouth, Flint withdraws, chuckling as he settles down in the scarce unoccupied half of the mattress. He scratches the nape of John’s neck.

“Better?” Flint murmurs.

John swallows. “Much. Thank you.”

Flint merely hums an acknowledgement. He reaches for the copy of the _Iliad_ John had borrowed from Madi for him, the one he keeps on the bedside table beside the oil, and shifts John’s boneless form so that quartermaster is half-draped over captain. Flint begins to read aloud:

 _Meantime Patroclus to Achilles flies;_  
_The streaming tears fall copious from his eyes_  
_Not faster, trickling to the plains below,_  
_From the tall rock the sable waters flow._  
_Divine Pelides, with compassion moved._ _  
Thus spoke, indulgent, to his best beloved._

* * *

“We’ll resume tomorrow.”

Flint asks him about his past and all he has is a handful of half-truths and lies to offer. Flint’s words linger in the air even as he departs, a shift slope to his shoulders as he retreats, with a claim of some meeting with Rackham. John doesn’t argue, even if Flint’s lies are even more easily dismantled than his own. It feels proper, cruelly cutting as the world so often is, that Flint’s falsehoods should sting as sharply as the metal boot sliding back over his stump.

When they meet again, at the council meeting with Madi, her mother, and the other pirate captains and their quartermasters, Flint offers him the same usual brusque nod he always gives John in public. Well, if Flint is prepared to behave as though the awkward questions and disappointing answers of the morning never happened, than John is more than happy to share in the amnesia.

He does a splendid and successful job at this until they end up back in Flint’s hut, kissing more fiercely than they usually do. They spring apart for a moment as their teeth knock together and John seizes the opportunity to grab the bottle of rum from the floor beneath the bed. He tips it back, some rum spilling into his beard, and sets it back down, before sprawling backwards on the bed. It settles his nerves against the part that comes next.

“Do you want to fuck me?” John asks.

Flint draws back, a steadying hand on John’s right hip, his other hand petting the inside of John’s left thigh. “I thought you said we were past this. That pride was not an issue between us.”

“We are, I am simply offering – ”

“ – something to keep me close? You think that I’d want that?”

“Your prick certainly doesn’t object,” John bites, jerking his head towards it. “Unless you’re afraid it’s going to snap off the moment you put it up my arse.”

Flint rocks back on his heels, settling his weight on John’s hips. “What the fuck does _that_ mean?”

“It means that you’re being stupidly obstinate about this and I can’t help but wonder why, captain.”

“Forgive me if I’m obstinate about not wanting to make you uncomfortable.”

“Is that how you feel about being fucked by me?” John reels upward so fast that Flint sprawls backward before recovering himself. “A discomfort to be tolerated.”

“That’s not what I fucking said. I’m quite certain that your grasp of the English language is firmer than that, _Mr. Quartermaster._ ”

“How about this for some precision verbiage.” John grabs his leg and fathers his clothes, gritting his teeth as he forces the iron boot back onto his stump. “Fuck. You.”

“Silver!” Flint roars after him as John stomps out of Flint’s cabin and back towards his own.

The next morning he is scrubbing several months’ worth of accumulated grime from his skin on the porch of his hut when Madi stops on the platform below.

“Is the white man finally going to be white again?”

He drops the pumice stone in the water. Grey-brown water splashes out of the basin and down onto the slats of the platform. Madi wrinkles her nose; John doesn’t blame her.

“I think I’m just going to scrub all the skin off and start anew,” he says, leaning back in his chair and tilting his head back.

The stair-planks creak.

Madi takes his pruned and freshly-scrubbed hand and holds it up to the sun. Her thumb smooths over his knuckles.

“Not so much white,” she muses, “as pink. Like a –”

“Please,” John says, throwing an arm over his eyes, “whatever you’re going to say is going to be so wholly unflattering to me that I won’t be able to bear it, not this early in the morning.”

Madi laughs, rubbing her thumb over his sensitive skin once more before dropping his hand.

“Come and sit with me?” he asks.

“For a little while,” she says. He lets her sit in his chair and moves the basin of water off the low stool he had it resting on, so that he can sit there instead.

He and Madi sit in silence for a while, the hum of the flies and the noise of the village soft in their ears, before she says,

“You and your captain have fallen out.”

“You can’t know that.” He is met with a calm smile. “How can you possibly know that? Why am I – ”

He stops himself short. _Transparent_ is not the word he wishes to use.

“Hm?” Madi says.

John shakes his head. “Nothing. I had just hoped that I wasn’t so plainly – obvious.”

“Well, if we are talking about how I know you and your captain have fallen out, it is because you are nowhere near his side this morning, and he has already this day been in several arguments with Teach that I am certain, if carried out at an even slightly louder volume, could be overheard by Woodes Rogers in Nassau.”

He winces.

“And yet which you, apparently, managed to sleep through.” She nods to his left leg. “It is bothering you less?”

“Much less.” In truth, as exhausting and embarrassing as his exercises with Flint were, finally taking Howell’s advice and allowing his stump to air out had so far prevented the return of any infection and had provided it an opportunity to recover from the merciless pressures of the boot. “I apologize for not being present to alleviate some of Flint’s short-temperedness this morning, but while issues of me may be adjacent to his ire, I assure you that I am not the cause of it.”

“I hope you are a better liar for your men,” Madi says, raising her eyebrows at him. “As for the other thing, I know how close you and Captain Flint have become.”

If John cannot hope to lie to Madi with his words, his eyes will do him even less good. He is forced to avert them, looking off into the distance. “He is my friend.”

“ _I_ am your friend,” Madi says. “What you do with Flint is much more than friendly.”

His cheeks and ears flare with heat as he whips his head back around. “We – you – ”

“I am not going to tell anyone,” Madi says, “who does not already know. But this is a small village and ships are no better for secret affairs. More people than not will find out eventually.”

He tightens his grip around his crutch. “Is this…a warning?”

Madi’s eyes widen. “Of course not. But you had asked me once to be your tether as you descended into Flint’s depths to meet him there fully, and now it seems that you have no intention of coming back out. Did you not once tell me of your worry about the fate of those whom Captain Flint has called friends before you?”

“A lot has changed since then.”

“Obviously,” Madi says. “But what has not changed is that when a man first needs you and thereafter calls you friend, or lover, a little suspicion is a healthy thing.”

John blows out a breath, half a bitter chuckle. He stares down at his hands, one scrubbed raw, one still with dirt trapped beneath the ridges of his fingers. “It seems to me that, in this moment, the same thing could be said for him with respect to me. I needed him, and still need him.”

Madi tsks. “Whatever he is to you, whatever you are to him, I don't believe you need him to be the man you are. And whatever type of man he is, if he has any claim of friendship or affection, he should be able to accept you for that man.”

John hums and considers his hands again. They sit in silence for a while longer.

“I understand your mistrust of him,” John says at last, “and yet what I cannot understand is why you would still follow him into this war in which you and your people will all risk so much.”

“You are following Captain Flint,” she says, rising to her feet. “I am sending him in before me.”

That afternoon, he meets Flint at the cliffs. For all of Madi’s talk of Flint’s short temper this morning, he is almost irritatingly calm as he works John through their familiar drills, which John still manages to fuck up even after all this time.

“You’re still leaning forward,” Flint says. He avoids Silver’s eyes – has been, the whole time they’ve been up here today. “Let’s go again.”

Bile rises up in John’s throat. Does Flint feel as though he bared his soul to the wrong person that night around the fire? Does he feel that he’s been doing the same in Silver’s bed, every night since?

He _resents_ that Flint ought to feel that way on account of him.

“I have no story to tell,” John says.

Flint’s head rises.

Silver drops his own eyes to the ground. Seagulls cry overhead as he speaks. “It all might seem as though I'm trying to conceal something from you, but the truth is there is no story to tell.”

“No one's past is that unremarkable.”

“Not…unremarkable, just without relevance. A long time ago, I absolved myself from the obligation of finding any. No need to account for all my life's events in the context of a story that somehow defines me. Events, some of which, no one could divine any meaning from other than that the world is a place of unending horrors. I've come to peace with the knowledge that there is no storyteller imposing any coherence, nor sense, nor grace upon those events. Therefore, there's no duty on my part to search for it.

“You know of me all I can bear to be known. All that is relevant to be known. That is to say, you know my genuine friendship and loyalty. Can that be enough and there still be trust between us?”

Flint is staring down at the flat of his cutlass, turning it this way and that so it catches the sun. The light strikes John’s eyes for a moment as he waits for Flint to respond, and he averts them again, considering the rocky, dusty terrain beneath their feet, which does not suddenly open up to swallow him whole, for all that it might be a kinder fate. And yet the ground feels as though it shifts beneath him as Flint nods, almost to himself.

He flicks his sword at John, not wholly meeting his eyes. “Again.”

They repeat their drills and then they walk back to the camp together in silence, and for all that they part once they enter the village, their parting is neither amiable nor inimical, which is an improvement over last night’s cussed farewells.

Still, as he lies awake in his cot that night, counting strands of thatching on the roof above his head, he considers that he will have to reorient himself to spending his nights alone.

Until someone knocks outside his door.

“Yes?” he says.

A head pokes in. It’s Flint’s.

“Hello,” John says, sitting up. His heart pounds in his ears.

“Hello.” In the doorway, Flint shifts from foot to foot. “May I...”

“Of course.” Flint takes the chair rather than joining Johnin bed, though he doesn’t exactly hasten to slide over to make room for Flint. How thoroughly he’s broken the tender, fragile thing between them with his savage honesty, when lies and blatant betrayals had left it unmolested.

The red and green jewels set in Flint’s rings spark in the light as Flint twitches his fingers. His fastidiousness is yet another thing that sets Flint apart from their pirate brethren: unless Flint is fresh from battle, the rings always sit immaculate of dirt or blood on the captain’s powerful hands.

“I have tried,” Flint begins, “to come up with a list of reasons why you might not wish to share the details of your past with me. Those unending horrors. Each one more terrible and terrifying than the last.”

John’s throat closes, his innards scraped raw. He can’t breathe while Flint speaks.

“I can only ask your forgiveness for my bringing this up again,” Flint continues, meeting his eyes, “but I – struggle with the idea of disavowing one’s past, based on my personal experiences. I’m certain you’ve recognized as much. What I want to  say is that I don’t think any less of you for your inability to make yourself transparent in the way I have. In case I had left you with any other impression this afternoon.”

John’s swallows. The power of speech returns to him. “I – appreciate it. But – I still won’t tell you anything, even if it changes things between us.”

“It doesn’t change anything for me.”

Words desert Silver again as Flint gazes at him, his fingers clenching at air, his eyes as green and clear as a steady Caribbean harbor.

Flint has leaned in while they were speaking. Their faces are close enough that it is no matter at all for Silver to lift a hand to Flint’s stubbled cheek, for him to return Flint’s gaze measure for measure; to feel utterly transparent in spite of having said nothing at all; to lean in and press his lips to Flint’s.

Flint’s hands come to frame John’s face, holding back the wild mane of curls as they fall back into each other, searching, seeking. At least John is searching: for some assurance that this will be enough, that Flint _will_ take him at his word.

“It will be,” Flint murmurs, and John realizes he’s spoken aloud.

“Someday it won’t be,” he whispers, but Flint hushes him, and bears him down.

* * *

They are together every night until only one nightfall remains before they sail for Nassau.

For once, they elect to bed down in the captain’s cabin on _The Walrus_ instead of making the punishing trek back to camp. Even on the coolest of nights, the journey leaves John sweating and sore (and not in pleasurable way). And they still have plenty of preparations to make for their fleet here out on the water.

Flint’s shouted orders are occasionally audible in the cabin as John moves about. The sun sets red and gold beyond the windows, but the light won’t linger long, so he takes a flint to the lanterns on Flint’s desk. Then he settles in the captain’s chair with a dark red leather-bound book plundered from the bookshelf, both privileges that John has only recently extended to himself.

He opens to the face-plate and reads the words written there.

The words leap from the page and sear themselves onto John’s heart. For a moment he swears that the candles have blown out, for his vision goes dark. He slams the cover of the book shut and pulls his hand back as quickly as possible.

John is not a superstitious man, despite having fallen in with sailors and pirates. He has heard (and told) his share of ghost stories in his time. He has even heard the story of this particular ghost from Flint himself. He is not a superstitious man, but he had not been expecting to meet the ghost of Thomas Hamilton here this evening.

With a  deep breath, John lifts the cover again. He reads the inscription again:

 

_James_

_My truest love_

_Know no shame_

 

Why is he so surprised? That Flint, a man defined for the last ten years by this relationship and its unfairly tragic end, might keep a memento like this close? That Thomas Hamilton might be the sort of man to give him one?

It is only when John begins to read past the inscription that he becomes utterly _baffled._

So engrossed is he that he fails to hear Flint come in until the captain clears his throat. John spooks at the sound, jumping in the chair and sheepishly closing the cover.

“I didn’t mean to pry,” he says.

Flint approaches. John offers _Meditations_ to him and he takes it. “I’m certain that wasn’t your intent, but once on the hunt I doubt your nature would ever allow you to abandon the scent.”

Flint replaces the book on the shelf. His fingers drift over the spine.

“I suppose it’s unfair,” John says, “that you’ve told me so much about your past, all that’s meaningful, surely, and I – well, I still wanted to know what kind of person he was, outside of your memories.”

Flint comes to lean on the far edge of the desk. The corners of his mouth twitch up. “What, you think my memories are unreliable now?”

“All memories are unreliable,” John says. “Do you think that I, all of ten feet tall, walked into that tavern the night that I killed Dufresne with the literal Devil riding on my shoulder?”

“I can’t say I recall, but I wasn’t present.”

“So what I really want to ask,” John continues in spite of this quip, “is if Thomas Hamilton ad a particularly well-tuned sense of humor.”

Flint strokes his beard. “Wicked, in some regards, yeah. And you ask because…?”

“Because I haven’t known you very long, but you are a man as least like a staid rocky promontory as I have ever met.”

“I think Thomas gave that book to me in the hopes it would make me a better man.” Flint leans back against the desk, grimacing at nothing in particular. “I once beat another officer in a public tavern for insulting his and Miranda’s honor. I’m certain that the two were not unrelated.”

“How uncharacteristic of you,” John drones, “to become involved in a violent altercation.”

Flint cocks an eyebrow. “I’ve never stomped a man’s head in.”

“If you had a metal leg, I’m sure you would try.”

Flint laughs.

“There is someone on this island who reminds me of him.”

“Sorry, are you speaking of me?”

This is met by another chuckle. Only the prospect of bloodshed and battle could put Flint in such an easy mood. It was an unnerving effect for John to witness, as he had spent most of his life running away from such battles and still had to wrest his mind away, from time to time, about thinking about the insensibility and insanity of this one.

“The infamous Long John Silver wasn’t exactly who I had in mind, though there are some similarities that do present themselves to my mind.”

John finds he is…not eager to hear himself compared to the legendary Thomas Hamilton.

“Who, then?”

“The queen’s daughter.” Flint hums, then gives John a certain sideways look. “I can tell she’s not particularly fond of me, though she’s taken to you just fine.”

“Her not trusting you is perhaps her only imperfection, sadly.” John muses. “She’s steadfast, wise, strong devoted to the cause. Her people and half ours would follow her anywhere.”

“And you?” Flint asks. “Would you follow her?”

“I – ” John jerks his head up and realizes that Flint is smirking at him. “I’m following you. Surely you can see that.”

“You’re at my side,” Flint says. So simply. John’s heart clenches. “But there’s no reason that you couldn’t be at Madi’s side as well, if that was a possibility that you wanted to explore with her.”

The tips of his ears are surely turning pink. He ducks his head. “Even if she were ever to take notice of me in that way - which I think is highly unlikely, given that she is a princess and I, a pirate – I don’t have your experience navigating such arrangements, and I think I would be altogether terrible at it.”

Flint leans over the desk to brush a clutch of Silver’s curls back behind his right ear. His fingers linger there, tracing the lobe, drifting over the soft skin beneath it. Finally, a single finger slides down to the underside of John’s chin and tilts his head back.

“I thought you the smallest man I’d ever met when we first encountered you. The bloody cook!” he says. He slides his hand to cradle the back of John’s head, thick fingers tangling in the curls. “But if you should change your mind about Madi, as your captain, I would be happy to help you navigate those uncertain waters. Thomas and Miranda - there is nothing I regret about loving either of them, except how it ended.”

John swallows. “I appreciate the offer, Captain.”

Flint’s broad shoulders block the candlelight as Flint leans forward to drop kisses to John’s cheeks, his forehead, and his nose. In this shadow, this small space of darkness that Flint has blotted out so that John can join him in it, he’s never felt more warm; never felt more close. Their own private darkness is a promise held between them.

They crawl into Flint’s cot after a long spell kissing. They don’t go further than that – not tonight, when both of their energies and focus will be keenly needed in the morning. They merely lay there, the ship faintly creaking about them, the cot faintly swaying beneath them, holding each other. Each time that a new fear or a new imagined fear threatens to tear John away from the present moment, he wraps his arms a little tighter around Flint, until Flint leans in to kiss him and John exhales again. It’s terrifying, and lovely.

* * *

Then it all goes sideways.

* * *

They’ve been running, Israel Hands and John Silver, over the sand dunes that surround the hinterland of the Wrecks – and running is no mean feat for a one-legged, be-crutched and exhausted man. So while John relishes in their momentary survival, hiding behind an outcropping of rocks, he’s still doing what he always does: plotting his next avenue of escape.

But when three Redcoats crest the seaward side of the dune, having circled back behind them, John has to admit that he’s not so much _outwitted_ in this scenario as _outrun._

Before the British bear down upon them, something entirely unexpected happens to John; something that’s only ever happened once before in his whole existence. Someone (several someones) come back for him. People don’t typically (ever) return for John Silver – he’s always already running in the opposite direction.

There’s no place to run in the desperate heat as Flint cuts the throat of a soldier. He wipes the flat of the blade across the top of his thigh, grinning at John the whole time.

John is still stunned – reeling, relieved – that he doesn’t protest as Flint pulls him to his feet in front of Hands, Joji, and Dooley. He wobbles on his crutch, the world off-axis, and doesn’t say a word.

He doesn’t say anything for so long that Flint finally has to clear his throat to get John to stop staring in to his eyes.

“I’d say you look like shit,” Flint says, gazing at him with such radiant fondness that Jon wants to sequester from all those watching eyes, “but you look pretty good considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Considering you were a dead man.” Flint’s voice hitches. Which explains, to some degree, why Flint is staring at him as though he were indeed the resurrected Lamb of God.

John breathes in, deeply. They haven’t discussed this, haven’t truly navigated this aspect of their relationship before: on Maroon Island, the men knew, the men didn’t know, fuck what the men knew and, what they thought. But in this moment, Flint is so very close and so very devoted and he’d come back even when John hadn’t expected him or anyone else to. He finds himself swaying into Flint’s space.

A hound barks and Flint steps back.

“We need to move,” he says, sliding his knife back into his belt. Joji and Dooley keep their weapons close and trained on Hands. “What about this one?”

“Don’t,” John says. They all look at him. “Leave him. We need all the fighters we can get.”

Flint grimaces, a hand still wrapped around the handle of his gun where it protrudes from his studded belt. Joji and Dooley descend down the dunes, but before Flint can follow, he stops and looks back at John. The smile Flint offers flows around John’s heart, warm as honey and stinging as saltwater in equal measure.

Their fingers brush for a moment as they fall into lockstep. For now, it’s enough.

* * *

Later, it’s not enough.

In the governor’s mansion, Flint crowds John up against a wall with peeling paper.. Their hands and mouths and bodies press against the hands and mouths and bodies of the other. It hadn’t been enough to have Flint walk beside him as he rode into Nassau. It hadn’t beneath enough to stand next to Flint, their shoulders touching as they faced off against the Redcoats. It certainly hadn’t been enough in the aftermath of the battle, when grabbed his hand and squeezed it so quickly that John still isn’t convinced he hadn’t imagined it, because Flint was gone a moment later, winking off into the human debris to reorganize the men.

“You mustn’t look at me so in front of the men, Captain,” John says as he treats from a particularly breathless kiss, pushing their foreheads together.

“How so?” Flint asks, all honeyed smile. _Just so,_ John wants to say. He has to close his eyes, forehead against Flint’s, to steady himself against that particular look.

A warm, calloused hand smooths the hair back from John’s temples, coming to cup the back of his neck.

“Should I have any reason to feel shame for what anyone might read there?”

John opens his eyes.

“Of course not,” he hastens to say, because if there’s anything he’s learned from Flint’s telling of his own history, there are certain aspects of a man for which he should not be forced to bear shame, and Flint has borne a share of other men’s shame for things undeserved. “It’s simply that…we all have our vulnerabilities. And as far as I can tell, Captain, in this moment, the point at which you are most vulnerable is…me.”

Flint stills. His hands had been mapping out the contours of John’s face and shoulders, but now they move to his hands, strong fingers encircling John’s wrists. Flint grasps John’s wrists, pushing the cuffs of John’s own coat back to reveal the fading pink manacle marks where his skin had been rubbed raw by the shackles.

John trembles, has to look away as Flint presses a butterfly kiss to inside of his left wrist, his lips tracing over the tender aching skin at John’s pulse point.

“I may accept that to be true,” Flint says, his lips moving against the inside of John’s forearm, which he lifts up to bring to his mouth, “but that raises the question of the point at which _you_ are most vulnerable.”

“Are you,” his hands twitch in Flint’s grasp as Flint’s thumbs smooth over the marks, “asking me about my past again?”

“I don’t suppose I am, no.” John grits his teeth. Flint lays a final kiss on the pulse point of the other wrist before releasing John’s hands. “But you did go as far to warn me once, not too long ago, that you thought that you might be my end, a reversal of this pattern that you saw. And I was wondering if your answer has changed since then.”

John opens his mouth, but finds there is no truth he is willing to admit to, nor lie he is willing to construct for the man in front of him. He dives back into kissing Flint again.

They carry on kissing in their stolen interlude for another few moments, before a measure voice interrupts them.

“I am sorry,” Madi says as she enters the hallway that no one else has dared to. His and Flint’s limbs are still all entwined; they’ve but barely parted from their kiss. “But Billy has returned from the beach with some of his men.”

John already has his crutch under his arm, ready to storm the parlor, when Flint’s hands around his wrists and Madi’s voice brings him up short.

“Perhaps you and Captain Flint should take a few more moments to consider what you will say,” Madi says, her lips curving into a smile as she regards them. Blood rushes to John’s cheeks and the tips of his ears.

“A few more moments, yeah,” Flint says. John scowls.

“Just a few,” Madi says, and departs.

* * *

John realizes that when Madi said _just a few_ , that stupid fucker Fate intended to hold them strictly to it – because it seems like he has only a handful more moments with Flint before his captain is on the other side of an iron gate, striking deals with Eleanor Guthrie.

Flint asks for his trust, but it’s not like he has any other choice in the matter.

“I think he made the right decision,” Madi argues. “It will be difficult, to get through these next few days and weeks without the cache. But since when did we expect this would be anything else?”

John bows his head and he huffs a laugh. It’s not a pleasant sound, even to his own ears.

Madi folds her arms over her chest. “What?”

“Jesus,” he says, “you sound exactly like him.”

“Why is this a problem?” Madi says. “Perhaps it is because you have a type, John Silver.”

John shakes his head, makes a fist against the table. “It’s as if Flint anticipated an outcome in which I was forced to choose between him or Billy, but instead of trusting _me_ to choose, he forces my hand so obviously, by asking me to trust him. I’m committed to Flint, I’m committed to you, and yet…”

“You know as well as I that Billy cannot exist alongside Captain Flint for long,” Madi says. She leans over to rest her hand over the fist he’s made, offering only the briefest of touches. “You have always known this, that sooner or later, one or the other must go. So Flint has taken the choice from your hands, but was it ever a choice for you, the way you have laid it out? Perhaps this is a small mercy.”

“Forgive me if I can’t at this moment consider the removal of a man who – up until a few weeks ago, was the one person who I considered to be my closest friend – a mercy, small or large or otherwise.”

But he doesn’t remove his fist from under her hand.

“I know Billy was your friend,” Madi says, looking at him steadily, “This is not easy for me, but I know it is harder for you. I know that. I believe that Flint knows that.”

He looks away. His fist flattens beneath her hand and he lets their palms brush together. “I don’t think Flint gives a shit whether Billy lives or dies.”

Madi’s tug on his hand brings his head back around. “But he knows that you do, doesn’t he? And I think he very much cares about what you think.”

“What do you think?” he asks.

Madi sighs. “The damage done to this alliance was caused by Billy. It may be that the only way to repair this damage is to remove that which caused it. It will be the only way to regain the trust of those slave communities uncertain about what this alliance stands for. That is what I know.”

“And you truly think that, in spite of all our recent setbacks, that this alliance can still succeed? What if it can’t? What if we have to walk away? What if you have to walk away?”

“There is no walking away from this,” Madi says. “Not for me.”

Not for Flint, either. He knows.

John leans forward and kisses her on the forehead, a brush of his lips over her sun-warmed, smooth skin.

“You are right,” he tells her before he goes to plan his siege. It’s not a triumphant admission. He feels the specter of loss settling on the middle of his chest already, the anchor tying him to everyone he loves. “I do have a type.”

What he does – has done, allows to be done – to Billy is unspeakable, but necessary. But what he allows to happen to Madi is so needlessly stupid, and even worse.

He avoids Flint and Rackham and hides in the captain’s cabin on _The Walrus_ until Flint comes in and so very gently shuts the door behind him.

His captain treads carefully over, as if John has suddenly transformed into a Gorgon, and pulls up a chair next to him.

“Still no sign of Rackham?” John asks.

“No,” Flint says.

“Do you really think they just – “

“Abandoned us? Yes.”

The ship rolls beneath their feet. He hears Flint’s raspy breathing: inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.

“I'm sorry,” Flint says at last. “I need you to know that I did everything I could to keep her safe. I don't expect that to mean anything.”

“It wasn't your fault.” John drags the back of his hand over his eyes, rubbing his nose with it. “It wasn’t – if I hadn’t sent her to the tunnel – if I had gone instead – ”

“No, no.” Flint interrupts him, cupping the back of his neck. “There are a thousand _ifs_ , Look at me.”

John does.

It’s hard to let himself be held this way – by Flint’s reassuring hands, by Flint’s  understanding eyes – his heart a wound as vulnerable and raw as his leg was after Vane’s mad quartermaster cut it off.

And John knows, as fond as Flint is of Madi, as grief-stricken as the captain himself looks, that this is the reality that Flint prefers: that Flint has not had to been stripped of another partner; another lover. But he can’t protest, because Flint’s other hand is coming to cup his cheek, his thumb moving slowly over John’s cheekbone.

“When I was drowning over Miranda,” Flint says, “you helped me find my way out. I will do the same for you. I give you my word. Can you trust that? Is that enough?”

John closes his eyes, more tears beginning their burning trail down his cheeks. He presses his face into Flint’s hand. “Am – am I enough? For you?”

“Of course you are.” Flint tilts his chin back and kisses him chastely on the lips.

He doesn’t ask the next question, _Am I enough even without this war,_ because his soul has been scraped too raw today to know the answer.

“We’ll make this mean something,” Flint whispers to him, “I promise you we will.”

John sighs and turns to press his head against Flint’s shoulder.

* * *

Tom Morgan finds him when they return to Maroon Island and hands John a letter that he opens with shuddering hands.

He doesn’t take it to Flint immediately, like he should. God spits in his face and another letter arrives. Two miraculous resurrections in the span of a week, who could ever hope to be so cursed?

So he keeps the letter to himself. It feels good, in a twisted way, to know something for once that Flint doesn’t. And he doesn’t tell Flint. And then keeps not telling him.

Flint might burn the world for his truest love (but not for John) and might yet stop on account of him, and Silver might burn the world for Madi.

* * *

“Of course I lied to you!” John slams his crutch against the floorboards and pivots violently to face Flint again. “I let you try it your way! I did trust you. But I’m through wagering with her life and if you would care to convince me that this partnership is anything more than a tool to enable you to do whatever it is that matters to you in any given moment – if this partnership remains anything more than that, then you _will_ follow me, and you will do as _I_ say.”

“Are you sure it’s not my partnership that you wish to be rid of, rather than the other way round?” Flint snarls.

“Don’t you fucking dare play the jealousy card on me, when you encouraged it as much!”

“Then answer the fucking question! Is this the choice you’re committed to making?”

“You, of all people, should know that if you have to ask what the outcome of such a choice would be, then you’ve already lost. Force me to a choice and you’ll regret it. Because it’s clear what you would choose if it were between me and this war – you’ve already taken the other path. And I know she would choose the same path as you. But I’m not through with either of you yet, so I’ll see you kept from your martyrdom for a little while longer.”

Both of their chests heave.

“You knew who I was,” Flint says. “You know who I am. I told you everything about me, even when you couldn’t return the favor. Was there something about my motivations that I didn’t make clear?”

“They have only ever been clear as they pertain to achieving the outcome you desire from moment to moment. And now it seems you are singularly motivated to achieve your death, mine, and hers in the process.” John’s words taste bitter in his own mouth; he wants to spit it out right then, the words that will turn Flint’s arrogance, his surety, sideways – but he’s not cruel. Not _that_ cruel, not that stupid, that he would throw away that piece of leverage when it might be so dearly needed in another moment. “We will find a way to put your war back together with whatever we have left at your disposal after we rescue her. I do not expect your understanding, but I demand your support. As my partner, as my – friend. Do I have it?”

Flint’s eyes go glassy, sliding into some terrifying temporary vacancy that Silver became so familiar with after Mrs. Barlow’s death.

“Do I have it?” John repeats.

Flint’s eyes refocus and when they meet John’s again, they are that particular green-grey shade of melancholy that John remembers so well. He forgets to breathe for a moment as Flint says,

“Yes.”

* * *

_Flint fucking lied._

* * *

When they cross swords on Skeleton Island, a smoking bullet buried between the eyes of Dooley’s corpses a few feet from them, sheer relief floods through John, urging him onward. The last months, they’d been an aberration of the face of an otherwise dismal existence. Nothing gold could stay, of course. Every life he’d ever led before becoming Silver had provided ample evidence of such – tenderness and love, passion and purpose were not meant for the likes of himself. He knew that. He _knows_ that.

What had made him ever think otherwise?

Flint had.

That unfettered sense of relief, of despair and of wild anger such that he hadn’t felt since the night he’d killed Dufresne, lasted right up to the moment that the undergrowth wrenches his crutch sideways, and John Silver with it. Time falls away as he topples over, as he watches Flint freeze, watches Flint’s eyes widen, watches the point of Flint’s sword slipping downward.

_I’d be forced to hesitate before doing you any harm._

He strikes: a wild, off-center, chaotic blow, that lands as his bad knee hit the dirt. It gives way beneath him and he tumbles forward. His world explodes into white pinpricks of pain and light that stab him in the eyes and in the leg.

Tangled in the undergrowth, Silver shakes the hair from his eyes and raises his head.

Flint touches his fingers to his bleeding arm, his eyes still huge, his cutlass dropping to the ground beside Silver. The cut bleeds with a sluggish rhythm, the dark purple fabric of Flint’s shirt clinging to the muscle of his upper arm where the blood has already soaked through.

Flint looks at the blood on his fingers, hen at the cut, then back at Silver.

Silver scrambles backwards as best he can, hand blindly groping for his own cutlass behind him. “Fuck – I – ”

The ground shakes beneath them.

It’s Flint, is his first thought. In other equally daft-headed passages such as this, he’d been inclined to attribute to Flint a sort of supernatural prowess, an ability for Flint’s emotions to manifest themselves in the physical world. The earthquake was Flint’s anger, his rage at being betrayed, at being cut at by Silver, being made to bleed – this unkillable man. Silver doesn’t think it should have been possible for him to land that blow, but he hasn’t been thinking much up to this point, either.

Flint stands and offers a hand down to Silver.

He blinks. He blinks again. The hand is still there.

Flint looks down at him, his eyes shadowed. He looks about to draw his hand back when Silver takes it, feel the familiar callouses press against his skin and pull him smoothly back onto his feet, and God if he isn’t ruined by that alone, the feeling of Flint’s sweat-slicked palm chafing against his. There’s nothing for it – Flint drops his hand the moment the crutch is back under his arm and John wants to cry out for the loss of it, but how do you kiss a man that you’ve just tried to kill?

Hands follows them up onto the ridge where they watch the smoldering remains of _The Walrus_ wreck in the deep.

* * *

Their battle against Rogers is terrifying, but they are victorious; more terrifying yet is the smile that a soot-streaked Madi gives to a blood-soaked Flint as they regard each other across the deck of _The Eurydice._

He watches Madi join Flint at the quarterdeck rail. Their shoulders brush as they lean at over the rail. They’re talking about - war, maybe. Rogers. _Him_ , he realizes, as Madi glances back at him and smiles. She nudges Flint, who doesn’t turn around, simply shakes his head.

Madi returns to John, takes his hands in hers, and kisses him lightly on the lips.

“Thank you,” she says.

“I haven’t done anything you should be thanking me for,” John says, flustered. He ducks his head, specifically not looking in Flint’s direction. But Flint must _know_ , even if he hadn’t _seen._

“You have brought us to this conclusion,” she says. “That’s enough.”

Madi looks back over her shoulder at Flint. The smile she offers John is sharp.

“Your captain thinks you did this because you are in love with me,” Madi says. “I am not sure he believed me when I told him that he was misinformed. That you did it because you are in love with him. Even if you do not realize it yourself.”

“I,” John says, looking away. His throat tightens. “I can’t.”

Madi squeezes his hands.

“You can,” she says. “You must. That man should know that you care for him as much as he cares for you.”

She leaves him with another kiss on the cheek.

Flint is gone from the deck when he looks over again, but even looking at the empty space he’d previously occupied makes John’s heart clench.

It’s that moment when Silver decides to use Rackham’s out.

He finds Flint later in the captain’s cabin on _The Lion._ Flint looks up when Silver enters.

“Shouldn’t you be making your farewells to Madi?”

Silver doesn’t hesitate in shutting the door behind him. He crosses the room quickly, with as much as grace as he can manage, until he’s standing only a pace’s length from Flint.

He draws in a breath.

“No.”

“No?” Flint echoes.

Silver’s hand reaches out to curl around the fabric of Flint’s coat. His thumb traces the curve of a tarnished silver button.

“I have no way to convince you,” he says, “but it was never Madi who I truly wanted. You were the first one to invite me in, knowing full well who and what I was.”

“What you are.” Flint grasps the hand that John has stretched out to hold Flint’s coat. He lifts John’s hand to his mouth. His beard scratches against John’s knuckles as he bends his head to kiss them, bruised and blood and besmirched with dirt as they are. When Flint’s lips pull away, he looks up at John, still holding John’s hand a hair’s width from his mouth. Red rings his eyes, and when he speaks, John’s hand breaks out in gooseflesh. “And still I would welcome you gladly in again, even knowing all that I know now.”

The force of their kiss weakens John’s good knee: it’s elemental, a rip tide of longing that has him clutching at Flint’s shoulders for support. Flint catches him in his fall; his crutch clatters to the floor as Flint’s arms hoist him behind the knees. He sinks his teeth into Flint’s bottom lip, drawing a groan from his captain, as he lets himself be carried to the captain’s empty cot.

Flint lays him down on his back. Silver’s hands scramble at his shoulders before Flint can pull away, his legs winding around Flint’s waist. The hand not clutching the back of Flint’s head snakes between them to palm at the growing hardness at the front of Flint’s trousers.

Flint drops his head to Silver’s shoulder and bites down on his own lip, choking off a half-hoarse cry that imprints itself onto Silver’s skin.

He turns his head to whisper in Flint’s ear: “Fuck me.”

Flint turns his own head away, cheek pressed against Silver’s shoulder. Silver grabs one of Flint’s hand and moves it down to palm at the front of Silver’s trousers, his hips sliding upwards.

“Please,” John says. “Please, Captain. I want you in all the ways I haven’t had you yet. I’m ready. I’m more than ready.”

Flint lifts his head and his shoulders. He regards John for so long, and with such intensity that John has to fight the urge to flinch, keeping his breathing steady.

At last, Flint rises from the bed, without a word, to rumble around the cabin. When he returns, it’s with a vial of oil. Silver’s breath hitches as Flint settles between his thighs, slowly tugging his trousers down and then discarding them, starting to open John up with his mouth and his fingers.

John lays there trembling, his whole body shuddering as he sinks his teeth into his bottom lip, only allowing himself to pant quietly. A shadow falls over his face; he’d closed his eyes. Opening them, he finds Flint looking down at him, wearing that lonely saltwater smile.

“You don’t have to,” Flint says. It’s nearly a plea – and Jesus Christ, Flint looks through him for a second like a pane of glass, or a mirror, John’s past, present, and future occupying all the space between them.

“Please,” John whispers. “I want it, please.”

Flint hesitates for another moment, thumb reaching out to dab a tear from John’s cheek. “You’re afraid.”

He forces his best shit-eating smile. “You’ll find I’m frequently, if not always, afraid, Captain. Now…please.”

Later, he’ll think of this on the island. How their bodies mapped on to each other in the slanted shadows and thin squares of light that the sun, sliding sideways through the window of the captain’s cabin, cast on the bed; how Flint, holding John’s left knee in the crook of his elbow, bent his head to kiss the inside of John’s ruined knee.

He’ll keep all the memories just behind a window in his mind, the panes streaked over with dirt, as he tells Flint about Thomas Hamilton: alive, and in Savannah. He’ll keep them there when he writes to Madi and relays to her that he had to take Flint out of the war, for Flint’s sake and hers. He’ll keep them there until he convinces Flint to accept the outcome that Silver has constructed: no war, no death, not for them. For Captain Flint, exile and infamy; for James McGraw, retirement and anonymity. John will wait an hour, a day, a year, if need be, to convince James to let himself be sprung from this trap. He’ll keep them there while he and Flint and Thomas Hamilton escape from this war, this nightmare, and perhaps he’ll be allowed to stay.

Perhaps one day, if John’s forgiven, he’ll let those memories slip back through.


	2. Epilogue

_ Some years later _

John Barlow, of an evening, comes home to his lovers.

First, he stoops to stir the fire in the hearth. It’s not so chilly now that one of them must rise every few hours or so to tend to it, but there remains a draft in the small kitchen that makes him shiver.

He puts as little pressure as possible on the crutch as he treads down the hallway, to the bedroom, the door left ajar. His eyes adjust after a moment, tracing the forms of the two men beneath the quilts. One of them is lightly snoring. They are peaceful in repose, freed from the burdens and anxieties of the day’s labors. He thinks of the pallet beside the kitchen hearth, and turns towards the door.

“Where are you going, pet?” a groggy voice asks.

Unseen by Thomas in the darkness, John’s ears flush.

“I didn’t want to disturb you,” he answers.

“Too late,” Thomas says. When John makes no further move to approach the bed, Thomas sits up and lifts the cover of the quilt. “Come now, do you think I’d let you scamper off, now having seen you? It’s warmer here than by the fire - he’s hot as a furnace and loud as a bellows.”

James snores particularly loudly, as if to emphasize Thomas’s point.

If it were day, John imagines he would see Thomas raising his brows at him.

He shuffles around to the far side, Thomas’s side, of the bed. It’s not really meant for three. It’s barely meant for two, even. There’s times where the crowded space is too much for any one of them, Thomas in particular, and he retires to the pallet beside the hearth.

Not tonight, however. John strips down quickly and gets beneath the covers. By some treachery of Thomas’s, he finds himself sandwiched in the middle of the two men.

It’s still new. So new that John must remind himself to breathe.

James, who has previously slept through John’s entrance (despite previous claims, years ago, about John’s ability to  _ approach unannounced _ ), his undressing, and his jostling with Thomas for sleeping position, awakens the moment that John touches his upper arm.

“You’re very late,” he grumbles, but his arm immediately wraps itself around John’s waist, drawing him near so that James can burrow his face into the wild mane of John’s curls.

“I’m sorry.”

“You say that a lot these days,” James says. His hand tightens and then releases on John’s hip. 

“I have many years of not being sorry for anything to make up for,” John answers.

“Oh, pet,” Thomas says against the back of his neck. “You have nothing to be sorry for in this bed.”

“You belong here,” James whispers. “By my side, and me by yours.”

John finds he can’t apologize for that.


End file.
